The Heart and Soul Nebulae, the double open star cluster h & χ Persei

While the weather remains uncooperative with persistent heavy cloud cover, I decided to revisit some old imaging sessions. Here we have IC 1848 (the Soul Nebula), IC 1805 (the Heart Nebula), and the star clusters NGC 869 and NGC 884 (h and χ Persei).

The image was captured using manual tracking, with each frame exposed for 5 seconds at ISO 1600 and an aperture of f/5.0. I used a 100mm focal length, resulting in a total exposure time of approximately 12 minutes.

This is quite minimal for such faint nebulae, but they showed up reasonably well. The light pollution zone appears orange, transitioning to yellow at the edge. The shot was taken from my backyard.